Orientation Committee

Duties

Orientation (start planning in June)

Help with organization of departmental orientation day, held during the week before classes start. We need to coordinate with Mary Kelleher-Jones, Peggy Lau, and the EEGSA to make this work. Looks like the CSGSA did lunch at LaVals for this last year. Plan a panel discussion?

Things that should be discussed:

• Classes
• Administrative stuff they need to do
• GSRs, GSIs, and Fellowships
• Research areas
• What else?

Orientation Web Pages

Update the CSGSA orientation page for new students.

Big Siblings

Recruit volunteers, assign big siblings, produce letters for new students telling them who their big sibling is and telling (or warning) them about orientation activities. See the 1996 letter.

This letter gets included in some packet sent to new students during the summer; you need to find out who's in charge of it. WICSE (wicse@eecs) has a big sister program, so for incoming women who have already been assigned big sisters in their research area, we can probably just put that name on the letter, but sometimes WICSE big sisters aren't in the same area (or even in CS, or grad students), so for these students big siblings still need to be found.

The Life Guide

The fabulously popular and famous CSGSA Pub and Cafe guide, which Ketan Meyer-Patel and Jeff Forbes started way back when, should be expanded to include information on restaurants, places to go, things to do, and miscellaneous secrets of the Berkeley area. Suggestions and input are more than welcome.

Get-to-know-ya Event (end of August)

This has taken the form of pizza, ice cream, picnics, and other unofficial events. We need to decide on what, where, and how.

Recruit Peer Advisors (end of January)

These are people who are available to prospective students to answer questions about their area of interest at Berkeley (questions about advisors, funding, resource availability, etc.). We recruit peer advisors in each of the following areas:

• architecture
• artificial intelligence
• compilers
• databases
• graphics
• multimedia / user interfaces
• networks
• operating systems
• parallelism
• programming languages
• software systems
• theory

Call Night (early February)

Typically call night is held in the middle of February. Coordinate with Mary Kelleher-Jones (marykj@eecs). When Sheila Humphreys was coordinating, she ordered pizza for us one time from Round Table (on University Avenue) and had it delivered. It avoids the LaVal's controversy and they deliver! We typically call 60+ people, so it's good to get up to 8 people for this (that's about how many phones we typically get). Also, we only call U.S. students. We e-mail foreign students. Also, on call night, do not tell people that they have been admitted. Instead, say that the admissions committee has recommended them to the Dean for admission. The Dean looks over some of the applications because the Admissions Committee is occasionally sloppy about checking certain requirements (like the hard cutoff on the TOEFL exam). See Mary Byrnes (mkbyrnes@eecs) for more information on this.

Call night requires getting the list of people admitted for the fall. There are some rules about this:

• Do not let anyone from any other school see this list.
• Some current students will want to see the list so that they can call people from their undergraduate schools personally. Tell them not to do this until after the call night (or at least until they receive the official admit letter).
• Certainly, do not call anyone to inform them of rejection.

Computer Science Visit Day

Mary Kelleher-Jones will tell you when it will be (normally, a particular day in mid-March)

1. In the middle of February, send e-mail to CS students asking for volunteers to house prospective students who will be coming to visit. Get as many people as possible for this, because lots of people call asking for housing fairly late, so it's good to have a group of people ready to take in those last-minute people.
   • idea: House prospective students with current students in their area. We did not do this, but it is probably a good idea.
   • another idea: Currently, the EECS department does not advertise that we will find housing for prospective students on visit day. The department forwards requests from students who ask for housing to us. If we recruit enough people by starting early enough, we may be able to advertise it. The first time, we should probably start recruiting early (January), but still not advertise the housing possibility. We should see how many volunteers we can get before advertising!
2. Arrange a party for them on the evening of visit day itself. One time, we took students to a bar, hung out there for a while, and then those that wanted to socialize more went to someone's apartment. We should buy the drinks!
3. Get people for a panel discussion. Ideally, have at least one person for each area. Nikki Mirghafori made a list of things that she always brings up at these panel discussions.
4. Get the schedule of events from Mary Byrnes (mkbyrnes@eecs) or Mary Kelleher-Jones (marykj@eecs) to find out if they are making you responsible for anything else.